Krishna is our source not chronologically, but ontologically (Gita Daily)

Some people ask: “If we souls are eternal, as is Krishna, then how can he be our source?”

The Bhagavad-gita itself presents both viewpoints before reconciling them. First, the Gita (02.12) puts the eternality of all souls and Krishna on an equal footing. But then it (10.08) extols as wise those who understand Krishna to be the source of everything. Later, it (15.07) reconciles by informing that all souls are eternally the parts of Krishna — parts who suffer when they pretend to be wholes under the spell of the mind. This verse points to the sense in which Krishna is our source: not chronological, but ontological; not in the sequence of origination, but in the status of subordination.

Time, as we understand it here in the material world, doesn’t exist in the spiritual world — that world is eternal with no creation or destruction of things of the kind that happens here. So Krishna is not our source in the sense that he existed first and then created us.